Anthony Gallo - Heritage
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Anthony Gallo designed his first loudspeaker at the age of fourteen. His first commercially available product - the Nucleus reference speaker, went on sale in 1994. Today, his Nucleus Micro, A'Diva and Dué loudspeakers are sold in over 40 countries. Anthony Gallo was born in 1963. From an early age, he had an interest in the sciences and would take apart just about everything he could get his hands on. At around age 13, he began to become hooked on loudspeaker design. His first experiments were with electrostatics - at age 14! "Absolutely, I got shocked a zillion times, I was always awed by their transparency and purity. The dynamics however were always short of my expectations." Anthony then moved on to working with ribbons." I took apart an old radar tube called a magnetron. A magnetron has about thirty pounds of Alnico V. After removing this huge magnet, I started using it as the basic magnetic circuit for my ribbon designs". Once again he was hooked on their speed and transparency but "they were very hard to drive and limited in dynamic range, not to mention the myriad of cavitational resonances created by the pole pieces and various reflective distortions. By that point, I was determined to continue on my search for the Holy Grail of tweeters. I started buying every dome available in the US but none even came close to satisfying me". Then in the early 1980s, an electronics magazine issued an article about the uses of Piezo film and the potential for audio applications. "I threw the magazine aside for a few years but in the back of my mind I knew that I would some day work with this material." In 1987, the first version of the CDT (cylindrical diaphragm transducer) was born. It took nine years of research and development to get the CDT to its current status. During that time Anthony worked for Panasonic where he was a commercial video engineer. He also started and ran a thriving video repair business, "I ended up selling the business along with my cars and everything else I owned to continue research on the Nucleus and various patent expenses." The Nucleus started out as a six-piece system. "It took special movers to get it from one sound room to another. It utilized state of the art wooden cabinet technologies with constrained layer damping, extensional damping, walls laminated in varying density sheets of lead and elastomer and had no parallel walls. Each channel weighed in at over 300 pounds. I was told by several people in the industry that it was the best speaker they had ever heard, but that I would never sell any as it would have cost over $15,000 and this is not practical for a start-up company." "I started trying to find a way to preserve the sound while saving money on the only component I could, the enclosure. The problem was coming up with an equally inert enclosure. It had to be either very, very massive or incredibly rigid. It could not have any parallel walls and had to minimize diffraction. These were my main criteria. Coincidentally, the enclosure with the best diffraction characteristics was also the strongest structure known, the sphere. I found that the speaker did not need mass and in fact the less mass used the better it sounded. Ironically enough, the 1.5-pound 12" diameter sphere that was used in the Nucleus blew away the 300-pound monolith in terms of transparency and lack of cabinet coloration". In 1993 when Anthony had sold off the last of his possessions, Gary Pelled came along. Gary was a lighting engineer specializing in energy conservation via efficient lighting and design. He was working with the owner of a small facility in the Bronx. While discussing mutual hobbies with him, Gary mentioned that he liked audio equipment. The owner said "Oh, you should go say hello to this guy in the back, he is renting some space from me and he builds speakers". Gary went to the back of the shop where he met Anthony for the first time. Anthony had the satellite portion of the old wooden Nucleus system hooked up and Gary was immediately awed by the sound. "I wanted to buy a pair and told Anthony that when he was ready, I wanted one for a discount price. I knew right away that Anthony and I would become friends. We had the same hobbies and interests while growing up and most of all , we both were entrepreneurs and honest hardworking guys". As the months passed, Gary would call Anthony and offer him business and marketing advice when he called to see when his speakers would be ready. It became apparent one day that Anthony had run out of money to continue his research and bring the Nucleus to market. He told Gary that he had considered placing an advertisement looking for an investor. "I asked Anthony why he did not ask me to invest. He told me he that since I had my own business, he didn't think I would be interested. I decided at that very moment that I would invest in this technology and devote half of my time to forming a speaker company with Anthony". Gary eventually had to give up his original business as Gallo Acoustics took over all of his time. As Gary tells it, the progression of events is best summarized as follows: "We began by working together literally at the living room table. We listened to the behemoth Nucleus, which looked sort of like a Watt Puppy on steroids, and dreamed about ways to deliver what we were hearing to the world. It was around that time that we hit on the spherical concept. You know, you always hear stories about companies that start out in a garage or a basement. For us, it was a big deal when we were able to rent out the basement of Anthony's brownstone in Brooklyn/NY and just get out of the living room! We moved into the basement. Mind you, that was a 100+ year old building and the dust down there was deep enough to ski on. There was also an old coal shoot which we liked and a boiler that broiled us all summer and put out enough fumes to do permanent damage all winter. This is one of those basements that have the hinged steel doors on the sidewalk. You had to open them up and climb down these steep mouldy steps just to get down there. Whatever was on the sidewalk (rain, snow etc.) would seep into our lab. It was a real challenge. If you forgot to duck on the way down, your head hit the steel trap door. In any case, we built some work benches and were off building the first generation of Nucleus. It did not take long for us to gain critical acclaim for our sound at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and other trade shows. It did take time to get people to accept a large sphere in their living room. It was probably a year and a half down there before we rented a studio apartment around the corner. More (2/3) |
